Wednesday, October 14, 2009

More of the usual stuff

Finally got to download supplementary data, table 1. Unfortunately the authors lied about this giving the diet composition! While giving a detailed breakdown of the evil fat, no suggestion was made as to the composition of the carbohydrate. "Lab chow" (is almost always starch) is being compared to a "high fat" diet of unspecified carbohydrate composition which produces fatty liver. It probably tastes sweet too.

There was a time when this sort of research was published only in hard copy, which was useful as an emergency source of loo roll. Now it's all electronic and even the supplementary data are useless for that delicate purpose...

However, the supplementary data do tell us that the high fat mice were obese, hyperglycaemic and hyperinsulinaemic. So I guess they were eating their fat in the form of concentrated Fanta...

But no one is saying in the methods or supplementary data. This is not science!

By the way, thanks for pointing me to the supporting tables -- I saw that study yesterday and couldn't find the info on the composition of the high fat diet. Now I understand why they hid the info in the separate supplement... Sneaky scientists!

It would be useful if it gave the diet composition. But fructose is fructose and glucose is glucose and even mainstream seems to be aware of this nowadays. The study is valuable as it (probably) says that drinking 8 litres a day of HFCS sweetened cola is going to give yourself and your child fatty liver. I think we know that now. After that what do you say about all the fancy gene induction stuff? Drop the sugar!

Fully agreed. You seem to focus a little less of omega 6 as the culprit of fatty liver disease. I thought Stephan made a good case in this series of posts: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/liver.

I have no doubt that sugar plays a big role, but we don't know for sure the researchers gave sugar in the high fat group but we do know for sure they gave lots of PUFA - and since they don't say which kind, I think it's the omega 6 kind. Of course, if they gave a high sugar & high omega 6 diet the study becomes even more laughable.

About Me

I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory.
I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.

Organisation (or lack of it)!

The "labels" function on this blog has been used to function as an index and I've tended to group similar subjects together by using labels starting with identical text. If they're numbered within a similar label, start with (1). The archive is predominantly to show the posts I've put up in the last month, if people want to keep track of recent goings on. I might change it to the previous week if I ever get to time to put up enough posts in a week to justify it. That seems to be the best I can do within the limits of this blogging software!